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Congo's conflict makes fighting Ebola, sexual violence risky

Anne Rimoin, associate professor of epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and director of the UCLA-DRC Health Research and Training Program, was quoted in an Associated Press article about violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is making it difficult to control the Ebola outbreak there.

The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to a Congolese surgeon brings rare global attention to a region surging for decades with rebel conflict that now threatens efforts to contain a deadly Ebola outbreak.

As Dr. Denis Mukwege describes to the world how he stays in his hospital, protected by United Nations peacekeepers, to avoid further attempts on his life, teams of health workers not far away in eastern Congo feel an uncomfortable kinship as they combat Ebola amid the daily ring of gunfire.

War in the vast region once had the aim of trying to unseat a president, or hunt down those suspected of genocide in neighboring Rwanda, or simply claim a piece of Congo’s trillions of dollars in mineral wealth. Now the conflict has splintered, with dozens of rebel groups traumatizing a population that sometimes has little idea who is behind a deadly attack.